Reducing vitamin K deficiencies makes it possible to better ally against severe forms of Covid-19, according to Dutch researchers. A discovery that adds to the long list of treatments used around the world to treat patients infected with the virus and which American researchers have studied.
- Researchers found that patients admitted to intensive care or who died from the new coronavirus suffered from vitamin K deficiency.
- One of them recommends taking vitamin K supplements, which are harmless to the body.
- In the United States, researchers studied 2,706 articles on the subject of coronavirus treatment and calculated that 115 different drugs were prescribed, mostly antivirals and antibiotics.
Vitamin K is the blood clotting vitamin and helps prevent the risk of bleeding. It is mainly found in vegetables such as spinach, broccoli, cabbage, lettuce or even asparagus, but also eggs and certain types of cheese such as blue cheese. Dutch researchers have assured that they have identified a link between a vitamin K deficiency and the appearance of the most severe forms of Covid-19.
Take vitamin K, risk-free
By studying 184 patients hospitalized in the Canisius Wilhelmina hospital located in the city of Nijmegen (Netherlands), for severe forms of the disease in a Dutch hospital and another control group composed of non-sick people, the researchers quickly found that patients admitted to intensive care or who died suffered from vitamin K deficiency. In addition, severe forms of the new coronavirus cause blood to clot and lead to the breakdown of elastic fibers in the lungs while the vitamin K participates precisely in the production of proteins that regulate coagulation.
Quoted by the British newspaper The GuardianDr. Rob Janssen, a scientist who works on the subject, advocates for people to take vitamin K supplements.”We have an intervention that has no side effects, even less than a placebo. There is one major exception: people on anti-coagulation. It is completely safe for others. My advice would be to take these vitamin K supplements. While it doesn’t help against severe Covid-19, it’s good for your blood vessels, bones and probably your lungs too..”
Antivirals, the most used treatments
Since the appearance of the coronavirus, unknown to all, it has been necessary to manage to treat patients, even if it means testing unapproved drugs and treatments. To see clearly in this flood of treatments used around the world, American researchers from the University of Pennsylvania (United States) studied all the publications on the treatments administered to the first patients with Covid-19. Among the 2,706 articles published on the scientific preprint sites PubMed, BioRxiv, MedRxiv and ChinaXiv with the keywords ‘Covid-19’, ‘SARS-CoV-2’ or ‘2019-nCoV’ between 1er December 2019 and March 27, 2020, the researchers extracted 155 from it who met serious selection criteria and mentioned the results of clinical studies with drugs. They calculated that 115 different drugs were prescribed to these 9,152 patients and published their results in the journal Infectious Diseases and Therapy.
Among all the treatments used, antivirals are the most represented since 71.5% of patients received them, led by the Lopinavir/ritonavir combination, administered to 21.9% of patients. Behind the antivirals, we find antibiotics which were used to treat 46.6% of patients and corticosteroids (26.1%). Behind these drugs, 7.6% of patients were treated with traditional medicine products such as herbal decoctions. “The vast majority of these treatments have been administered outside of any trial and experimentally.reports the study. Only a minority of articles have published actionable data on their effectiveness.”
.
